Hawthorne's Tragicomic Mode of Moral Allegory

Hawthorne's Tragicomic Mode of Moral Allegory Carol M. Bensick University of California, Riverside Recommending The Scarlet Letter to the readership ofthe American Men ofLetters Series, Henry James felt obliged to acknowledge a lapse in Hawthorne's taste. Discussing the "A" seen in the sky by Dimmesdale and the Boston townspeople, James permitted himself a pained murmur: "We feel that Hawthorne goes too far, and is in danger of crossing the line that separates the sublime from its immediate neighbor." When Hawthorne goes on to make what James judges to be "too much . . . of the intimation that Hester's badge has a scorching property," the younger novelist sighs, "We are tempted to say that this is not moral tragedy, but physical comedy." Overall, James fears, Hawthorne displays a culpable lack ofliterary "discretion" (Beatty et al. 29O).1 One hundred years after James, though commentators have come to accept that there are "important comic overtones" in Hawthorne's work, the assumption with which critics still feel safest remains that Hawthorne is, in the summary of Hennig Cohen, "A 'morbid' and 'gloomy' writer," with a "predominantly tragic view" (184). Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill use the word "somber" (177). Confirmations of this premise are ubiquitous in the critics. With reference to The Scarlet Letter, to give just one example, "(in spite of the modern reader's inclination to laugh when Dimmesdale opens his coat to display whatever it is underneath)," Richard Hauck never doubts that "Dimmesdale's future is tragic" (238). And in general, Jesse Bier expresses the consensus when he magisterially dismisses Anthony Trollope's conjecture that "the sinner's consciousness of sin in The Scarlet Letter made the tragedy verge on burlesque" as "not a fruitful line of inquiry" (374-75).2 One index to the profound investment of Hawthorne criticism in its conception of "Hawthorne's Tragic Vision" is commentators' agitation with a deliberately farcical sketch like "Mrs. Bullfrog."3 Cohen, for example, finds "Mrs. Bullfrog" 's account of a silly man's marital entrapment by a disguised crone "cynical and a little gross" (96), while in accents ofpersonal betrayal Neal Frank Doubleday calls the sketch an 47 48Rocky Mountain Review embarrassment for anyone with a respect for Hawthorne's work" (184). By and large, it is when Hawthorne does thus threaten his established classification as a tragic writer that Hawthorneans grow most uneasy. Yet as James was unusually frank in admitting, Hawthorne does threaten that critical orthodoxy, and more often than even James admits. Unruly sketches like "Mrs. Bullfrog" can be marginalized as "minor"; but within the canonical works themselves, the spectral "A" and the burning letter are far from isolated instances. Many examples press. Nothing could appear more ponderous, for instance, than the psycho-theological theme announced, with apparent baldness, by the title of "Egotism: or, the Bosom Serpent." Yet we have to wonder whether the tale's account of Roderick Elliston's grim efforts to starve, to poison, and ultimately to smoke out his supposed reptile sustain the anticipated gravity. Even ifthe supposed tragedy ofserpentine invasion could withstand these touches, the quoted opinion of those of Roderick's neighbors who, in exclamation points, "magisterially pronounced the secret of the whole matter to be Dyspepsia!" (Charvat et al. 10: 271), would seem to undermine it once and for all.4 If we could save our preferred tragic image of Hawthorne by ruling "Egotism" an exceptional case, the other tales would betray us. For even Hawthorne's most supposedly gloomy and terrific tales, "deep as Dante" as Melville in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" called "Young Goodman Brown" (Hayford and Parker 549), turn out to be inconsistent in their presumed "tragic" tones. Rather than bearing out the supposed magnitude ofhis sin in resorting to the forest, the language of"Young Goodman Brown" tends to trivialize that presumptively momentous event. For example, when the devilish figure laughs at him, Brown is said to become "considerably nettled." Over the course of the tale, such belittling language builds up an impression which undermines the apparent pathos ofthe narrator's final cry, "Alas! ... it was a dream of evil omen for Young Goodman Brown." James would claim that Hawthorne is somewhat desperately invoking...